“At an early age,” Agnes Maurer thinks close to the top of Agnes Lives!, “we have been taught to barter with our standing.” She remembers that rising up, when patronizing a high-end cafe, it doesn’t matter if the bakery subsequent door technically isn’t linked to the restaurant, in case you really need it. One should merely ask the waitress, politely however firmly, to go get it. She’ll oblige.
Agnes, the high-octane narrator of Hallie Elizabeth Newton’s disorienting debut novel, is catty, name-dropping, and bends the world to the fact she needs, even whereas completely nothing goes her means. She’s narcissistic and flighty, basing her value on getting over 11 Instagram likes and what her boyfriend thinks of her. As soon as, Leonard Cohen advised her she’s fairly. The novel is an uninterrupted stream of consciousness damaged solely by her speech; we don’t hear from anybody else, mirroring her pretentious phasing-out of anybody she deems beneath her. Agnes Lives! is formidable and dangerous—her voice is someplace between Valerie Cherish’s unabashed need for the highlight and Marnie Michaels’ relentless desperation—and but it’s one of the crucial riotously humorous novels of the 12 months.
“Babe, so the film? I’ll be doing errands all day however I’ll wait on your textual content. I really like you. Love you. Massive day. Love you. Will you say it again? Fall asleep.”
Sweating it out throughout a SoulCycle class at 6:30am one September morning in 2014, she realizes that she’ll do something for somebody to kill her. This form of thought is at first point out somewhat juvenile—her first ask to the barista has the cadence of the Tumblr-seeped self-lacerating humor that we’re attempting to maneuver on from—till you notice that she’s dead-serious, and tries robustly to get the job finished. She snatches a knife from the desk of her (“self-made and big-boned”) boss and is promptly fired, she buys a gun from a lady in a Carly Rae Jepsen shirt and wanders the hallway of a shady constructing to purchase cocaine, overhearing “a dialog in Chinese language that I think about includes a multigenerational household’s assembly a few problematic little one not doing his homework.” As her day stretches into the night time, her strategies get extra drastic and unhinged.
Simply by the pummeling nature of her ideas, the guide makes it fairly clear why Agnes needs to die—it isn’t a one-off joke, fortunately. Her thoughts zips from matter to matter—typically feeling unsubtly quirky, however most frequently working in her favor, depicting a troubled girl, or a girl who merely is confronted with the world as it’s. Agnes’ darkest ideas are on show, unsavory and brash. She spears Obama for not acknowledging Black Lives Matter or the truth that it’s the 12 months of the crystal, however what bothers her most is the informal tan swimsuit he wore throughout an ISIS briefing. “What the fuck was he pondering?” she asks. She’s burdened by life, and her inside monologue is formed by the pacing and freneticism of somebody with nothing to lose. I consider Meg Stalter talking to a confused Stephen Colbert about her London expertise: “You’ll be consuming breakfast, and also you’ll go, ‘Get me outta right here!’” Agnes’s scream is hid, however barely.
She’s a mannequin at Whorl journal (which reserves a spot for her on their “cultural council”), and a girlfriend to indie filmmaker Nathan Grey, a despondent, apathetic man who couldn’t care much less about her. She snatches up film tickets for a minimum of 5 totally different timeslots for whichever works greatest for him, and he doesn’t even get again to her on time to see any of them, regardless of her prodding. “He likes me in turtlenecks and white lingerie, serving him takeout in mattress on a tray,” which is a skateboard. She brings him again espresso and cleans the residence bare for him, remembering the time he mentioned she was “controlling his life” by putting in a medication cupboard within the lavatory. Nonetheless, she stays devoted to “my sensible man,” delivering a danish to his bedside, “his hair in a swirl of mind, his lips pursed in a cupid’s bow of wit.” Leaving for work, she inflicts a barrage: “Babe, so the film? I’ll be doing errands all day however I’ll wait on your textual content. I really like you. Love you. Massive day. Love you. Will you say it again? Fall asleep.”
Agnes Lives! is commonly hilarious, however the narration goes from a joke to an affecting second with overwhelming dexterity. She says to 2 separate males, as a bonus for killing her, that they’re capable of do something they need to her after she dies—her physique is their thank-you reward. And it’s clear she will get extra from Nathan than he does her—“I’m going to satisfy my companion, Nathan Grey, on the motion pictures”—however her need to be her personal sort of artist is wholly unexplored. “I needed to make issues with folks, with males,” she thinks. “Films with males, our personal sort of child.”
At instances reliant on shock worth and gore (Agnes succumbs to the muck of what New York Metropolis has finished to her in its final third), the novel actually may have gone sideways. A very formidable dilemma, an not possible narrator, an unwieldy construction—it’s a miracle Agnes Lives! displays Newton’s expertise so properly, in repeatedly sensible flashes. Take this half-visible dialog with the gun-seller, whose canine has social anxiousness: “He must get used to strangers. We’re in New York. I personally like strangers. I’m busy, too. Good luck to you too.” Many chats with gross sales clerks, editors and longtime exes depend on the identical refined cleverness, wry language tips from an irresistible humorousness. Agnes Lives! is greater than meets the attention—each a serrated knife and a toddler’s play cutlery utensil.
Agnes Lives! is out now.
